Therefore, shooting a fat old sergeant major was no big deal. A point that she made to the judge, without reference to the previous shooting which had, fortunately, never come to the attention of the authorities.
Her self-possession was almost her undoing. The sergeant major was vociferously defending himself on the not inconceivable charge that she had propositioned him and then shot him when he wanted to pay too low a price. In fact, he was trying very hard to get her charged with attempted murder. However, Cally quickly demonstrated that if she wanted to kill him she could have done so with ease. And no one could be found to back up the sergeant major’s assertions about extracurricular activities. In the end the former sergeant major found himself in a penal battalion and Cally’s picture was circulated around all the nearby military encampments where it made a nice pin-up with the caption: “WARNING! Jailbait! Armed and Dangerous!”
She hadn’t had much self-possession after finding Papa O’Neal’s body. She had covered the arm back up and stumbled to the cache to cry her heart out. But as the night went on, she had recognized that she had to leave. There was a full-blown battle going on to the north from the sounds of it, and the Posleen flowing through the Gap were spreading out. She had to head to the human lines, or at least find somewhere further away to hide. The Posleen would pass by something like the cache at first, but later they would come back and dig like badgers if there was any sign of materials or people. So she started to pack.
She didn’t know how long she would be moving, so she had to take food. And the nights were getting colder, so she needed some snivel gear. Papa O’Neal could probably make do with just a poncho liner but she wasn’t nearly as tough, or well insulated, as the old soldier, so she packed a sleeping bag. Extra water, fuel tabs, spare ammo… There was just too much. Even with what she packed if she was in the woods more than five days things would start to get hard.
She stared at the pile, unsure what to take and what to leave, until the floor flipped up and hit her on the face.
CHAPTER TWO
Rabun Gap, United States of America, Sol III
0242 EDT Monday September 28, 2009 AD
The external viewers had adjusted the night to sixty percent of daylight ambiance. The wood-shrouded hills were dark and cool under the gibbous moon and the Gap valley was occasionally visible as the shuttles crested the ridges.
Then everything went white.
The weapons were the sole survivors of a massive salvo fired from the northern tier of what was left of the United States. The Posleen assault on Earth had shattered almost every other industrialized nation but through a combination of foresight, ruthlessness and terrain the United States had managed to hold on to productive areas in the eastern Midwest, what had come to be known as “the Cumberland Pocket.” It was comprised of most of Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Ohio, Iowa and Michigan. In addition there was a northern tier of states — Minnesota, North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana — that were above where the Posleen could effectively campaign.
It was from these latter that most of the nuclear weapons had been fired.
Nuclear missiles from silos throughout the Midwest had been recovered and moved to safety ahead of the Posleen hordes. Violating numerous treaties, they had been converted to mobile launchers and now were positioned throughout the northern tier of states, most of which remained in human hands, and even up into Canada. Many of them would not have the angularity to reach the target area — their “minimum range” was still too long — but a few would. In addition, while most of the nuclear ballistic missile submarines had been converted to transports, a few of them retained their missiles. All of these weapons, enough to gut any country, were available to support the ACS airmobile.
But Posleen antimissile systems were tremendously effective; practically anything that crested the horizon that was under power or maneuvered would be destroyed. So the only viable choice was to try to saturate the defenses. However, it was not just the innumerable weapons on God King saucers that could engage the missiles; as they reached apogee they were visible to the thousands of landers still scattered across North America. So out of the thousands of nuclear weapons that were fired, only a handful survived to enter ballistic trajectories and become mysteriously invisible to the Posleen targeting systems.
Those handful would be more than enough.
The salvo of reentry rounds landed in a triangle pattern, one directly in the Mountain City Gap and the other two in the passes to the north and south. Each of the explosions was one hundred kilotons, almost ten times stronger than the weapon that hit Hiroshima, and wasted a circle three thousand meters in diameter, smashing every tree and scrap of brush to the ground or incinerating them and tossing them into the column of fiery gas that reached to the heavens.
The blast of fire and pressure reached out and scoured the ridges to either side, ripping up the trees and smashing them into toothpicks, flattening the maturing forests and ripping the soil out to the bare rock all the way to the tops of the hills.
“Sergeant Major.” Jake’s artificial intelligence device still had the toneless tenor that was the “factory” default. He had never bothered to personalize it. The AID was a Galactic introduction, a small, black, formable piece of what looked like plastic but that was, in fact, a continuous computing unit. The devices were fully AI and linked together in a seamless web of data that stretched across an entire planet. In this case the AID had picked up a piece of information from the net and after a nanosecond’s consideration determined that, yes, this was something that its human needed to know.
“Multiple incoming nuclear rounds targeted on Rabun Gap. The unit is outside the zone of direct danger, but anyone looking in that direction will experience flash-blindness.”
“Holy shit,” Mueller muttered. They were traversing one of the innumerable ridges in the area and while the Gap was quite some distance away, the fireball would not only be visible, it would seem like it was right on top of them. The ridgeline was a knifeblade of rock, made slippery by the rain.
“Down,” Jake snapped, pointing over the edge of the ridge to the north. It wasn’t a cliff, but it was steep.
“How?!” Shari snapped, shifting Kelly higher on her back and freeing an arm to brush hair out of her face. As far as she could tell, one step to the side and she and the girl were both going to slide a couple of hundred feet to rocks.
“Carefully,” Mueller replied. He was carrying both Tommy and Amber but he nonetheless started to shift down the steep hillside. But in a moment he stopped and shook his head. “Jake, it’s not going to work.”
“Why?” Mosovich said then cursed. “I’m a senile old fooclass="underline" ground-shock.”
“We can make it down, but…”
“It’ll flip us off the side,” Mosovich said, looking around. The ridges in the area were usually fairly easy slopes to either side; just their luck they were on one of the knife-edge portions.